Thursday, March 22, 2012

So right now I'm the pianist for a little ensemble of guitars and singers that plays at Mass once a week. After having been in GIA territory for the past 5 years, I now find myself in OCP land and don't know pretty much any of the "contemporary" songs. Occasionally there is a song that is scheduled for the upcoming weekend, and I glance at it, and it looks a little difficult, so I decide to run through it and "learn" it in advance. 100% of the time, I sit down at the piano, and play through it, and find myself not only able to sight-read it, but immediately find it boring-ly predictable.
My point of this isn't that it is a reflection on my own musical abilities, but rather, the lack of any sort of musical-sophistication contained in the music geared for contemporary groups.
Now, if I have no difficulty running straight through it since it's so predictable, then it does seem to follow that it would almost as easy for the average congregation to be able to pick it up.
But whether that is a good thing or not, is another conversation...

Sunday, March 11, 2012

And, perhaps, a cute little encounter I just had in the sacristy after Mass...

I was putting things away, and overheard two young men (high schoolers; I didn't notice if they had been serving at Mass,) talking to the priest (not the pastor.) They said something about the Latin Mass, and of course my ears perked up. Then I realized that they were talking about pattens, and someone said something about people receiving with their hands. I jumped in, and said, "Are you talking about patens? I know a parish that still uses them even when people receive on the hand." Then the sacristan, who was also there, mentioned that the communion rail was somewhere on the premises, and we joked about putting that back up. But we all admitted to not having any authority to do that. Ha. Then the priest was like, "oh...now we're dreaming..." and we all laughed and went our separate ways. But I couldn't stop grinning as I walked out of there!
"I'm one of you! Yay!" :-)

Friday, March 02, 2012

But I am beginning to find myself more and more amused/annoyed by priests who can't seem to get the Penitential Rite correct. Some of them never even got it before the new translation, but now it seems to me that many priests are even more confused by it than before, for a variety of reasons, (one of which I think is the major re-translation of the rarely-used option "B.")

Anyhow, I have now had not just one, but two priests whom I have had to mention the correct way to use the "Kyrie's," and my dear husband has also told me of another parish in which he knew the priests were not doing it correctly.

Dear Fathers... it's really not that hard...
Basically, we always do some form of "Lord/Christ have mercy."
So, either that would be option A (the Confiteor,) or option B ("Have mercy on us Lord,") either of which would then be followed by the Kyrie/Lord have mercy, OR we would do the option C (the tropes,) which already has "Lord have mercy" as a part of it.

I mean, I know that priests have a TON else that they need to be doing, but really, it takes like 2 minutes to sit down and just read straight through the rubrics of the penitential rite. I suppose it also makes me a bit worried when I think about all the other liturgical things that I'm probably not even aware of, and it makes me doubt even more the amount of time that most priests would spend even reading the basic rubrics. :-(